We’ll I am finally starting to get caught up from MMS 2011! It was great to see many of you there at the conference! I wish we could have MMS every month (especially if I could just go and not have to present)!
I was going to write up a blog post on all the new updates on SCSM that were shared at MMS, but Anders Asp has already done a great job of that on his blog. Since I am lazy, I’ll just point you over there instead of writing up essentially the same thing. That way I’ll have more time to write other blog posts.
Before I do that though I do want to point out a couple of key updates on the SCSM roadmap that were announced at MMS 2011:
- SCSM 2010 “R2” has been renamed to SCSM 2012. Two reasons for this change: 1) The scope of SCSM 2012 has increased and therefore is more than just an “R2” type of release and 2) the name lines up with the names of the other System Center products in the suite that will be released at roughly the same time as SCSM 2012 – Operations Manager 2012, Configuration Manager 2012, Virtual Machine Manager 2012, Data Protection Manager 2012, and Orchestrator 2012 (new name for Opalis)
- In addition to what we announced at TechEd Europe back in Nov 2011 we also now plan to have a connector to Orchestrator 2012 to bring Orchestrator “runbooks” into SCSM. From there you can easily include Orchestrator workflows as automated activities inside of change requests, service requests, and release records. When those automated activities become active in the process of fulfilling those requests, SCSM will trigger the workflow directly in Orchestrator and monitor Orchestrator for completion of the automation. This tight integration between SCSM and Orchestrator will open up even more possibilities for automation and will ensure that these automated steps are automatically monitored and controlled directly from inside of SCSM.
- Prior to MMS 2011, we hadn’t really gone into much detail about what we meant by a “service catalog” and “service request fulfillment”. Combined with the deep Orchestrator integration, this area of the product has really turned into the showcase feature area of the product that people are most excited about. The new self-service portal will be built on SharePoint 2010 using Silverlight based web parts. The entire portal and each of the web parts will be highly customizable using familiar SharePoint administration interfaces. The request forms on the service catalog will be configuration driven and mapped to work item templates for easy configuration.
- The schedule has remained unchanged with a beta planned for Q3 and RTM for end of year.
With that, please check out Anders’ blog posts (including lots of screenshots) on SCSM 2012 at MMS 2011:
Part 1: http://www.scsm.se/?p=297
Part 2: http://www.scsm.se/?p=342
And here is a blog post from Kurt VanHoecke too:
http://scug.be/blogs/scsm/archive/2011/03/30/notes-from-mms-service-manager-2012-overview.aspx
And here is an interview that our product manager did at MMS on SCSM 2012:
I wish you all could have been there, but hopefully this helps to share the excitement with you about what is coming in SCSM 2012!